Israeli President Shimon Peres attended a Holocaust memorial ceremony with Austrian President Heinz Fischer in Vienna’s Judenplatz town square on Sunday.

“Today, Austria accepts its joint responsibility with the Nazi criminals,” Fischer said, adding that Austria only relatively recently began the difficult-but-important process of acknowledging its role in the Holocaust and commemorating the country’s Jewish victims.

“I begin my visit to this country by bowing my head before this memorial, paying respect to the thousands of Austrian Jews sent to death camps from Vienna,” Peres said at the ceremony.